How true crime media has shifted since the phenomenon of Serial
On Monday afternoon, Adnan Syed walked free after a Maryland judge vacated his 2000 conviction for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend, when both were teenagers in 1999. Syed exited the Baltimore courthouse to cheers – in part because many people have worked for years, sometimes decades, to free a man who has always maintained his innocence. And in part because Syed is a celebrity as the subject of the first season of Serial, the mega-hit documentary podcast that essentially kicked off the genre’s boom in the mid-2010s.
Related: From Serial to In the Dark: the true crime podcasts that changed their subjects’ lives
On the surface, it’s easy to connect Syed’s release to Serial’s influence as the bedrock true crime podcast. The show’s first season, released in 2014, did bring mass public attention to the case. It was downloaded more than 68m times in less than a year, became the first podcast to win a Peabody award and spawned countless imitators. Serial became part of the 2010s cultural ether – a lightning rod for discussions on the ethics of true crime investigations as entertainment, fodder for crowdsourced sleuthing online and an aesthetic touchstone for a certain media era. Host Sarah Koenig’s parsing of arcane details and soothing narration – journalistic authority cut with personal confession, grappling with the case in real time – became true crime podcast de rigueur. (The Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building is essentially one long parody of the Serial-style podcast.) The NYPD tried to cash in on the true crime podcast boom with its own in-house production, Break in the Case.
Yet it would be incorrect to attribute Syed’s release to the podcast behemoth that outlived waning attention on his case. Public pressure from Serial and further investigations into the faultiness of Syed’s conviction – the podcast Undisclosed, or the 2019 HBO documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed – did not free him. Instead, years of work by advocates finally broke through thanks to a new law, a new set of eyes from the prosecutor’s office and an official review. Maryland’s 2021 Juvenile Restoration Act, which allows those incarcerated more than 20 years for crimes committed as a minor to have their sentences commuted, brought Syed’s case back up. Prosecutors reviewed it more than they needed to, and lost confidence in the conviction. The state’s motion to vacate Syed’s conviction is not an alternative theory on who killed Hae Min Lee but an acknowledgment of systemic failures – crucial evidence withheld from the defense, reliance on unreliable eyewitness accounts, flimsy evidence (in this case, cellphone tower records) treated as certifiable fact.
It’s impossible to disentangle Syed’s case from Serial or true crime entertainment more broadly; it’s not linear cause and effect. But prosecutors’ admission that Syed’s conviction was rife with errors mirrors how the vanguard of true crime has shifted since the boom ushered in by Serial and docuseries such as 2015’s The Jinx and Netflix’s Making a Murderer. In the years since Serial took off, numerous productions, including later incarnations of the flagship show, have shifted attention from individual cases ripe for Reddit dissection to examinations of design flaws in the American criminal justice system.
Netflix’s The Innocence Files, made in collaboration with the Innocence Project (whose Baltimore clinic worked on behalf of Syed), details in six devastating chapters how wrongful conviction is a feature, not a bug, of American courts; almost every episode corresponds with an error in Syed’s case. Ava DuVernay’s 13th, made for Netflix in 2016, indicted the US prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration of people of color, particularly Black Americans. Netflix’s 2020 series Immigration Nation embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for two years, capturing the shocking banality of routine government cruelty. Another 2020 Netflix series, How to Fix a Drug Scandal, examined how two compromised state chemists in Massachusetts – unseen but crucial figures in the criminal justice system – invalidated tens of thousands of life-altering drug convictions. Showtime’s 16 Shots, Cyntoia Brown: Murder to Mercy, Time: the Kalief Browder story, Dirty Money, – all use true crime examples as evidence of a broken system and prioritize advocacy over entertaining suspense.
Serial, too, has adapted since its chart-topping first season drew scrutiny over the ethics of using real crimes as narrative entertainment, however well-intentioned, and for the podcast’s rendering of immigrant communities. (Syed is Pakistani-American, Lee was Korean-American.) Koenig herself expressed discomfort with her work’s popularity at the time, calling the audience’s interaction with Serial as entertainment “worrisome” in 2014. “At the end of the day, we couldn’t control it,” she said of online dissections of Syed’s case. “It was silly to think we could control it, but we certainly tried.”
The fizzy popularity Serial brought to Syed’s case didn’t sit well with those involved, either. “Serial set fire to Adnan’s story, to some extent deliberately, and has never apologized or made amends. Should I be grateful? I find it hard to be,” Rabia Chaudry, Syed’s childhood friend and longtime advocate who first brought his case to Koenig, tweeted in September. “But I am grateful to the thousands that responded to the fire to help rebuild this house.” (In 2015, Chaudry and two co-hosts released Undisclosed, a podcast looking into wrongful convictions, starting with Syed.)
Serial’s second season moved on from a question of guilt/innocence to stranger “whys” in the desertion of the US soldier turned Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl. And its third season moved on from a single story entirely; instead, producers embedded for a year in a single courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, and focused on “the extraordinary stories of ordinary cases” which put “the troubling machinery of the criminal justice system on full display”. “If you’re looking for a murder mystery, this is not it,” said Koenig ahead of its release in 2018. The show’s parent company, Serial Productions, acquired by the New York Times in 2020, has released series on white parents and public schools, a North Carolina election-fraud case and institutionalized Islamophobia in the UK.
There will always be schlocky true crime documentaries, TV series and podcasts – entertainment appealing to the base human interest in spectacle, vicarious trauma or the futile quest to map a serial killer’s psychology. See: the podcasts Crime Junkie, Morbid or My Favorite Murder, which uses suffering as the basis for popcorn-inhaling obsession; the Netflix series Conversations With a Killer (the latest, out in October, focuses on Jeffrey Dahmer); streaming services’ tiresome obsession with Ted Bundy.
But true crime content has, in part, matured from obsessive dissection of individual stories to critiques of the system at large. That includes the ever-evolving public relationship with Syed’s case. “Adnan’s case contains just about every chronic problem our system can cough up,” said Koenig in a new 16-minute Serial episode released on Tuesday, updating listeners on Syed’s release. “It’s hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness, because we’ve built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct.”
The Syed content continues – HBO announced on Wednesday that production was under way on a new episode of The Case Against Adnan Syed for 2023, with “exclusive access” to Syed – and the true crime universe will only expand. But it’s impossible to engage with the genre now without understanding the influence of Serial and the host of questions its practice raised. The best of fraught true crime productions have worked to course-correct, putting the weight of public attention on systemic failures rather than private pain.
